exit, pursued by tentacles
by LadyMoriel
Summary: Loki arrives on Thor's doorstep sporting a ferocious scowl and dripping with some kind of noxious green slime that smokes when it hits the welcome mat. He elbows his way in before Thor can even get completely out of the way, and Thor closes the door behind him, wondering just how dangerous it would be to ask for details. Inspired by the Funko/Marvel animated short "Time To Unwind."


_Every now and then, Funko releases animated short films on Youtube featuring their Marvel characters, sometimes to tease the next box in their subscription service and sometimes just kind of because, I guess. For obvious reasons, I pay the most attention when Loki is involved, and I've been admittedly annoyed to see him featured purely as a villain even in a video explicitly connected to_ Thor: Ragnarok _(and although the other two with Loki, "Spellbound" and "Mjolnir Mischief," have been more comics-inspired, they're still showing Loki as he appears in connection to the MCU). Recently, they released another video about Loki and Dr. Strange, "Time To Unwind." (I can't link to any of them because FFN, but they're easy to find if you want to watch them.) It...bugged me. Kind of a lot. So I wrote fic._

* * *

Loki arrives on Thor's doorstep sporting a ferocious scowl and dripping with some kind of noxious green slime that hisses and smokes gently when it hits the welcome mat, after having already eaten holes in his leathers. He elbows his way in before Thor can even get completely out of the way, and Thor closes the door behind him, wondering just how dangerous it would be to ask for details.

"I am going to use your shower," Loki snaps. "Before you ask, _yes_ , it _would_ take too long to go upstairs to my own apartment. I hope your bathtub can stand up to a little acid, but if not I really don't care and _you_ will be fixing it," and he stomps toward the nearest bathroom without a backward glance. The tentacled thing on his shoulder does look back, or at least one of its upper protrusions swivels to point what is probably an eye in Thor's direction. Thor blinks back at it and wonders if he _wants_ to ask for details.

Loki disappears into the bathroom, slamming the door hard enough to make the whole apartment tremble. Thor shakes himself and heads for the kitchen. With this type of mood, tea is probably the safest bet.

At least 45 minutes later, Loki emerges looking cleaner but no less grumpy and wearing one of Thor's t-shirts, with his strange little companion now perched on his other shoulder. Now that his armor is gone, Thor can see burns and sucker-shaped bruises twisting up Loki's arms and encircling his throat, and his mildly concerned puzzlement spikes into real alarm.

"What _happened_?" he says, no longer able to restrain himself.

"That mortal dilettante Dr. Strange tossed me into some sort of netherworld, where I was set upon and _swallowed_ by one of the many eldritch monstrosities that dwell there." Loki stalks to the table and snatches up the mug of tea Thor just hastily poured, which he downs as if it's something much stronger and more interesting than tea. "I must have spent nearly an hour in its guts being digested—not to mention fighting off other, smaller eldritch monstrosities it had already swallowed at some point—before I could make it vomit me out."

Thor takes a moment to process this. "Somehow," he says neutrally, "I get the feeling that is only part of the story."

"So you suppose I might have done something to deserve that kind of treatment?"

"I don't know," Thor says, refusing to be baited. "Did you?"

Loki gulps down the rest of the tea and glares at him as if the whole thing is Thor's fault, which Thor is fairly certain it isn't. "There was," he bites out, "a _misunderstanding_." Thor raises his eyebrows, and Loki huffs an irritated, put-upon sigh. "Yes. _Fine_. I visited his absurdly titled 'sanctum' because I wanted to see whether he was adequately protecting the Time Stone, which in fact he was _not_ , so I…tried to relieve him of the responsibility he clearly has not earned."

Thor pinches the bridge of his nose. Checking on the known Infinity Stones is reasonable enough; the other, not so much. "I take it that didn't go well."

"He _wasn't_ guarding it properly," Loki says, a sullen note entering his voice. "It had _one_ ward, easily bypassed, and he only _happened_ to be in the same room, too focused on his book to bother paying attention to anything past the end of his nose, including the cosmically powerful artifact that could _destroy reality_ in the wrong hands. If that ridiculous cape of his hadn't reacted, he never would've known I was there."

"You couldn't have simply told him his security was lacking?"

Loki rolls his eyes. "And expect him to believe me? Hardly. Besides, I think I rather proved that it needs a better guardian. On the other hand, the Titan will almost certainly crush Strange like an insect when he comes for the Time Stone, and if Strange is arrogant enough to think his mortal power can stop that, he deserves it."

"Loki," Thor says reproachfully.

"Well, he _does_ ," Loki says. He sighs again, more heavily this time. "However, I would prefer the Titan fail to acquire any of the Infinity Stones, and Strange _is_ at least powerful enough to be useful. So I suppose if he cannot be convinced to surrender the Time Stone, better it remain in his custody—with some additional protection—than the alternative."

"If he wouldn't have believed you meant well before, he certainly won't after catching you in the act of _stealing an Infinity Stone_."

"In my defense," Loki says, "he banished me to a dimension of cosmic horrors without so much as bothering to ask for an explanation or even entertaining the thought that my intentions might not be entirely nefarious, so I think we can all agree he overreacted, and would have done whether I'd tried to steal the damn thing or not. And anyway, he doesn't have to believe anything about me one way or the other; he just has to listen when _you_ tell him what to do. Or Heimdall, maybe. Everyone seems to find him trustworthy. Explain what I was doing or say I acted against orders, I don't particularly care, but now you have an excuse to talk to him about this and a convenient example of just how unforgivably shoddy his security is."

"That…could work, actually," Thor says slowly.

Loki huffs again. "You needn't sound so surprised. How often have I ever relied on only one plan?"

"…fairly often, if memory serves."

"Then I'd say it doesn't," Loki snaps. "Just because some of my most recent and visible schemes—the vast majority of which, I might add, were not formed under the most ideal _or_ ordinary of circumstances—have been somewhat more haphazard than I prefer does not make that my _habit_."

Thor tilts his head to concede the point, mostly because arguing further is unlikely to accomplish anything (and, in fairness, for much of their lives Thor only took note of Loki's careful planning on the relatively rare occasions that those plans failed completely). "Very well," he says, "I'll speak to him, though I do wish you'd told me first. Perhaps you could've avoided being…eaten."

Loki snorts. "Last time he tossed me into a void just for setting foot in his city, so I am sure he would have come up with something even more creative given the opportunity. On balance I think I prefer being thrown to eldritch monstrosities." Thor winces at that, but Loki doesn't seem to notice, which is probably just as well. "Frankly I'm a little surprised he didn't show up at my apartment to confront me before I could go to him. Oh, and when you do visit him, make sure you get my helmet back."

"Your helmet," Thor says.

"Yes, well, it seems the thing that swallowed me didn't like it and spat it back out, and I'm reasonably certain it ended up back in Strange's study. So I need it back."

"I'll see what I can do," Thor says, shaking his head. "Honestly, brother, this is all a little new for me—our pattern for centuries involved me acting rashly and you smoothing things over."

Loki grimaces. "That's…a rather charitable way of looking at it, considering the last few years."

 _You weren't yourself_ , Thor wants to say, which is not entirely true but is at least closer to the truth than anything he knew until fairly recently. It skates too close to things Loki still doesn't like to discuss (or rather, will discuss when absolutely necessary, after which he invariably locks himself away to have a panic attack in private, and Thor categorically refuses to be an unnecessary cause of that), though, so instead Thor says, "Well, I _am_ glad you weren't hurt worse. I suppose my only remaining question is about…that." He makes a vague gesture in the direction of Loki's shoulder.

"Ah, yes," Loki says, reaching up to pat the thing on his shoulder; it presses one of its upper lumps into his hand like a very strange tentacled cat. "This is Jormungand. He was in the beast's stomach too, and he was actually quite helpful in escaping, so I brought him back with me."

"You brought a small eldritch being from a hell dimension back to our plane of existence," Thor says, "and now you plan to keep it as a pet."

"Yes, I did, and yes, I do," Loki says. "Is that a problem?"

"Do you even know what it eats?"

"I…well. I believe he subsists on a combination of…tangible and intangible forms of sustenance. With a bit more experimentation and research, I'm confident I can find something appropriate for the material portion of his diet. As for the other…" Loki's attention is suddenly fixed on Jormungand, or at any rate away from Thor. "I'm reasonably certain that he eats nightmares."

"…oh."

"Yes. So. You can probably understand the appeal of that particular symbiotic relationship." Loki's posture is rigid and defensive, as if he expects to be mocked for the admission, and something in Thor aches to see it. At the same time, the fact that Loki would mention the subject at all seems like a hopeful sign. They're both well aware that Thor already knows about Loki's problems with nightmares, of course, but if nothing else, it isn't something Loki likes to discuss much, certainly not when it's avoidable—which in this case it was, because there was no real reason for him to volunteer that information about the creature's diet.

He remembers when they were children, and Loki would have terrible nightmares—he woke screaming, sometimes, and other nights he would simply lie awake, too petrified to move because he was sure the monsters he'd dreamed about would catch him. When they were older and no longer shared a room, Loki crept into Thor's chambers every now and then, but those visits grew rarer and eventually stopped altogether. Thor assumed Loki was growing out of the worst of his nightmares and paid no more thought to the matter.

On the ship that held Asgard's remnant, where he was in close quarters with Loki for the first time in years (centuries, really, because their rooms in the palace weren't that close together), Thor learned otherwise. More specifically, he learned that Loki made regular use of muffling spells when he slept, or rather that he'd worked some into the walls of his old chambers for a variety of reasons and then had to recast similar spells almost every night while he posed as Odin, drawing on the power of Asgard to do so because those spells were both more complicated and more urgent. On the ship, drained from battle and no longer able to supplement his magic with anything external, Loki was…not entirely successful at sealing off his quarters, at least where Thor's room next door was concerned. So when Loki cried out in his sleep on their first night of travel, Thor heard him through the wall and resisted the impulse to go to him, because he knew how much Loki valued his privacy; but when it happened again, then a third time just a few minutes later and this time Thor could make out words, _please_ and _no_ and _help me_ —

He apologized, later, for wrecking Loki's door, especially because his sudden entrance hadn't so much woken Loki as worked its way into his nightmare. But during the 15 minutes or so that it took Thor to get him back to full lucidity, Loki said a few things that were…illuminating, in the worst possible way ( _an endless void, burning and freezing and suffocating but never able to die;_ falling _, so long he forgot there was ever anything else, and then he landed and that was worse_ ). Thor managed to set aside his own mounting horror long enough to help anchor his brother back in reality and insist on keeping watch while Loki slept, because Thor knew he wouldn't be getting back to sleep; it was all he could do not to demand answers then and there.

He got his answers and then some the next morning, Loki having apparently realized that some things couldn't be hidden forever, and Thor finally learned about Thanos, about the Tesseract and the other Infinity Stones, about the looming danger they all faced…especially with the Tesseract no longer shielded in Asgard's vault. Thor couldn't even be very angry about the last part, given how unlikely it was that Loki could have escaped Surtur's wrath without it, but the Tesseract's presence added a new urgency to their journey to Midgard and their dealings when they arrived. Thanos was coming; Loki was sure of that, and equally sure that none of them wanted him to find a single Infinity Stone.

As far as Thor is aware, Loki's nightmares lessened on their journey as the memories of Surtur's flame and a second fall from the Bifrost grew less fresh, but they never went away, if Loki's frequent fatigue was any indication; he just recovered enough to soundproof his quarters properly, although Thor still heard him, every once in a while. More often, he found Loki working himself to exhaustion, followed by a vicious sparring match with the Valkyrie, and as much as Thor wanted to tell him to take better care of himself, he understood. Sometimes the only way to sleep, when you knew nightmares waited for you, was to push yourself until you dropped. And after the Void and the Mad Titan, and all the things Loki said and didn't say, Thor found he wasn't very surprised that a few peaceful years on Asgard hadn't been enough to draw more than a little of the poison from those memories.

It was better, once they reached Midgard and Loki could ground himself in another realm or find true solitude when he needed it. Even in New York City, where they were given temporary quarters in the former Avengers Tower so they could meet with legions of officials about the threat of Thanos and the resettlement of Asgard's refugees, Loki seemed…more stable, more focused. But his apartment is directly above Thor's, and even though he has soundproofed his bedroom thoroughly, Thor can hear him pacing nearly every night, long after Thor himself has turned in.

If a strange little creature from another dimension can give Loki some relief from the nightmares that still shred his sleep, Thor is certainly not going to argue. "That does sound useful," he says, smiling warmly—and then adds, because making a fuss is the quickest way to get Loki to close off again, "I feel I should ask— _did_ my bathtub survive?"

Loki has cooled down enough by now to look very slightly embarrassed. "…more or less."

"Let me put it this way: will I be able to use it tomorrow morning without flooding the bathroom?"

"I suppose that depends somewhat on how careful you are," Loki says. "Look, I definitely can't do anything about it until after I've slept, but you can use mine. If you must. I'll…see what I can do about yours."

Thor finds he is considerably less bothered by this than others might expect him to be, which seems to be a natural consequence of spending any significant length of time around Loki. "Well, if you can't fix it, I'm sure I can bother Tony Stark for a replacement."

Loki's eyes narrow. "If that is your attempt to motivate me by invoking a sense of competition with another irritating mortal, it isn't going to work, because I don't care about your bathtub that much. Now if you'll excuse me, I actually do need to go to my own apartment." He pauses. "The tea was…passable. For once."

"You're welcome," Thor says, trying not to smile.

* * *

He waits until the next day to contact Strange, figuring the sorcerer might be more receptive after he's had a little time to cool down as well, and then sets out for 177A Bleecker Street. It's a nice enough day and it's not far to walk, as New York City distances go, so it's not long before he arrives at the Sanctum Sanctorum (which, yes, is a fairly ridiculous name even if the place is much more impressive on the inside).

Calling ahead might have been smarter and it definitely would have been more polite, but there are appearances to maintain and precedents to set, and anyway Thor suspects Strange monitors his sanctum even when he isn't in residence, so he knocks confidently on the door. A moment later, Strange's voice issues from a panel above the doorknob.

"Thor," he says, sounding…a little frosty. "Something else I can help you with?"

"Actually, I think I may be able to help you," Thor says. "I understand my brother visited you yesterday?"

Pause. "That's one way to put it."

"Then you probably have some idea what this is about. May I come in so we can discuss it?"

A longer pause. "…how about you just email me."

Well, now Thor _definitely_ wants to see Strange face-to-face. "I would really rather discuss the matter in person. I would not want any information about the keeping of…certain artifacts…to be overheard by the wrong people."

The panel sighs, grumpily, and then the door swings inward to reveal Dr. Strange himself. He is scowling, not nearly as impressively as Loki, and in place of hair he now has…tentacles. Dozens of them, some reaching to his shoulders, all twitching or wiggling under their own power, and all a violent shade of pink. As Thor stares, the pink turns in swirls and blotches into an equally violent orange, then a dead-looking gray, and then pink again but lighter and much sparklier. The longest tentacle waves in Thor's general direction and shimmers with an extremely familiar pattern of green, gold, and black.

Thor heroically manages to hold back his laughter. He does say, because he absolutely cannot help himself, "Something looks different about you. Did you get a haircut?"

"Hilarious," Strange says flatly, batting aside a tentacle poking his cheek. "Your brother is an enormous pain the ass, by the way."

"Oh, I know," Thor says, smiling in a way that is not entirely friendly. "I think, though, that sometimes he's a pain in the arse with a legitimate point to make. Wouldn't you agree?"

Strange makes a noise under his breath that sounds more like a growl than agreement, but it's also not an actual disagreement, so Thor decides to count it as a win. In truth, he's more than a little relieved, and for a wide variety of reasons: that Loki is capable of such a prank indicates that Strange, on his own merits, does not actually outclass him, which in turn implies that Thor doesn't need to add "what if Loki is still more weakened from the various ordeals of the last several years than he has admitted" to his already lengthy list of things to worry about (and might also prompt Strange to treat both of them less dismissively). Perhaps more encouraging, the fact that Loki chose a petty and annoying but ultimately harmless form of revenge instead of something more murderous suggests hopeful things about his state of mind and his willingness to focus on the greater threat.

Judging by his sour expression as he steps back to let Thor in, Strange seems to have reached a similar conclusion about Loki's inveterate villainy or lack thereof and isn't particularly happy about it. Thor had something of a speech prepared, about how when one is facing an almost unparalleled cosmic threat, one should be more careful about jumping to conclusions when potential allies are involved, and even when such conclusion-jumping is defensible, one _certainly_ should not banish the questionably villainous brother of an established ally to some other dimension to be eaten by tentacle monsters. He is still going to remind Strange of this, because apparently it bears repeating, but Loki being irritating has provided a convenient opening and handily made at least part of his point for him.

 _See, brother,_ Thor thinks, amused, _you don't have to change yourself to fight on the side of heroes. There's always a place for mischief._ Feeling much more cheerful about a great many things, he follows Strange inside.

* * *

 _Credit for Jormungand goes to Castillon02 on Tumblr, who suggested maybe Loki would find a friend in the other dimension, and I basically went "hmmmmm yes good" and then eventually this fic happened. After...more than a month. Look, there's a reason I call myself the Slowest Writer Eve_ r.


End file.
